The Hard Swim Upriver

So here I am: pregnant and blogging about it and how the little one growing inside me has already completely thrown my life off course.

I never thought I'd blog. And I especially never thought I'd be a "Mommy Blogger," but this just goes to show you how our ways are not always God's ways. This is the story of how I got here.

I suppose it started while I was still a graduate student, happily typing my way towards a Masters degree, when my husband (who I love) told me he wanted to accept a position with a company in Southern California. A land where we knew no one. A desolate desert land full of wannabe stars working the porn industry, drive-by shootings, concrete, and smog. I told him I couldn't live there. I told him I wanted a family some day and that I could not have a family living in that place.

I knew. I knew because this is the place my parents lived when they birthed me and my younger sister and they did not stick around long after that before high-tailing it back to the safe, clean, wholesome, and family-filled Midwest.

Well, needless to say I didn't get my way. This is what is meant by the verse, "Wives submit to your husbands as unto the Lord." I could have dug in my heels. I could have demanded my own way. And maybe I would have ended up with a divorce and an absent ex-husband, but probably not. Probably my husband would have elected to "Love me as Christ loves the church" and to stay with me though that meant being trapped in a dead-end job. He would have been unhappy and it would have been my fault. I decided I wanted my husband to be happy and I wanted to support him in his career endeavors. I made a conscious choice to submit.

The move was a difficult one. I was newly graduated and unemployed for several months in a strange land full of strange people. My husband worked every day, we had no friends, no church, and I knew where nothing was. I cried the first time I went to the grocery store in this new place. But then I found a job, we found a church, friendships began to bud. Though we knew my job would end come Dec. 31, 2009, we decided we wanted to start a family.

Silly me, I thought all women struggled to conceive. I thought what was supposed to be one of the most natural things in the world never was. My mother struggled to conceive me. My college roommate conceived only through IVF. A new and very dear friend had been struggling already for longer than seemed necessary. I'd been on the pill for years and imagined my uterus as a landscape vaguely mirroring the surface of the moon: a place that can harbor no life without intervention. I thought I'd have plenty of time to settle into a new job before actually needing to worry about maternity leave.

I was wrong but God was in control. I found out I was pregnant on Sunday, October 18, the start of week 2 in what proved to be a 3 week long interview process for a job at the same university I'd been working for 18 months. A job I was a shoo-in for. A job, one of the interviewers told me, they wanted to push me through for, get me started right away. Guess what? That job offer never came. One morning in the midst of this interview process I was trying to shower; I was exhausted and my stomach felt turned inside out and all I could do was sit on the floor and say, "God, if it's at all possible--if you can at all provide for us--please don't let me get this job." And that afternoon I received a phone call saying the job was not going to be offered to me after all.

And now here I am. Unemployed, pregnant, trying to pick up freelance work, trusting in God to meet our needs, and blogging about all of it. It may be a long, hard swim but I know it will be worth it.